Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Will web connections fail to cross the line during the Olympics?


There has been much talk about cyber-attackers planning to disrupt the forthcoming Games. However, a bigger threat will come from the unprecedented demand that will hit networks and web connections during this period.  

The major risks at the Olympics will come from the huge surge of web traffic that will occur as millions of sports fans stream events during the working day. This unprecedented demand will put many networks under a huge amount of pressure and some connections could simply grind to a halt which will impact on businesses throughout the UK.  

In addition, whilst the major broadcasting networks have good security measures in place, there is lots of potential for malware to be attached to videos from YouTube and other sharing sites and the positive publicity surrounding the games is likely to mean that people will be less discriminating about the items they choose to watch.  This could result in a huge surge of IT problems for both personal and business users during the Games.

Not sure what your views are, but it would be great to find out……..

2 comments:

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  2. To put some numbers on the issue >>>

    2008 Beijing Games:
    1) NBCOlympics.com served 75.5 million streams - that's about 9.9 million hours of online video.
    2) The BBC served 40 million+ streams equal to 6.5 million hours peaking at 200,000 concurrent viewers.

    2010 Vancouver Winter Games:
    1) NBC Olympics Mobile hit 82M page views / 1.9M mobile video streams.
    2) Akamai delivered over 5K hours of live and On-Demand video over the 17 days – that’s about 12 petabytes of data.

    2012 London Games:
    This year the BBC will break all the records both terrestrial and digital – 3D, HD, digital terrestrial, online, mobile …

    My advice is manage your network users or buy a big telly (and a licence!).

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